NOTE: Sustainable development in Phoenix, like sustainable development around the country and the world, is very often uneconomic in competition with sprawl, unless we take steps to “unlock” the opportunities. That usually means identifying and ad…

NOTE: Sustainable development in Phoenix, like sustainable development around the country and the world, is very often uneconomic in competition with sprawl, unless we take steps to “unlock” the opportunities. That usually means identifying and ad…

NOTE: This is a working paper presented at the symposium “Scaling in Cities” at Arizona State University, co-organized with the Santa Fe Institute, University College London and the Environmental Structure Research Group (Sustasis Foundation), in …

Radical computer software architects have been using pattern languages with dramatic effectiveness for several decades, thereby revealing a likely missed opportunity for architects of the built environment. The reasons are intriguing – and, we sug…

Another catastrophe has reminded us of the complexity of natural events, and the weakness of our own current technologies – the complexity of their unintended effects — in the face of such shocks. (I mean “technologies” both in the familiar sense…